“Hey,” said James.
Barby wore a sour look on her face. James wondered if her sale was going poorly.
“You sure blew out of here fast last night,” sniffed Barby.
“Yes. Um. Sorry about that. Listen. I have a question.” James drew a breath. He knew what she would answer. “Um, is there a jewelry store in the basement of your shop? You know, past the bathroom, behind the black fire door?”
Barby stood and faced James. She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?”
James stood his ground. “Is there?”
“No, there’s no jewelry store downstairs. I tell you what is downstairs, though. My personal fucking space. Is that what you were doing last night, poking around in my rooms?”
“And you’ve never heard of a man named John Castle?”
“Who?” Barby crossed her arms on her chest.
James nodded. He didn’t have to check. He knew she was telling the truth.
“Hey. Mr. Questions. How about you buy some Bondage or hit the bricks?”
James took a step backward, pointed toward the street. “I’ll, um—I’ll hit the bricks.”
“Damn straight.”
James headed toward the door.
“Creep,” yelled Barby.
But James Branch was already grinning, moving into the street, fingering the opals safe in his pocket.
* * *
* * *
Kissing in
Manhattan
Rally McWilliams was profoundly lonely. She wanted to believe that she had a soul mate, a future spouse gestating somewhere in Nepal or the Australian Outback. But in Manhattan, where Rally lived, all she found were guys.
“Guys.” She sighed.
“Yeah,” said Kim. Her voice was dark. “Guys.”
Rally and Kim lived in a SoHo loft. They were both thirty-one. They worked and dated guys. Rally never knew the names of Kim’s guys. There was a Republican, an electrician, and a doctor that Kim called Dr. Charm. Rally, for her part, had slept with a guy named Paul for three years in her early twenties, until he moved to Idaho. Then came Sam, who was sensitive and kind, and who’d once eaten lime-green Jell-O out of the hollows of Rally’s collarbones. Rally had figured that was the start of something extraordinary, but when Sam finished his Jell-O, he only burped and went to sleep.
“My mom,” explained Kim, “says you can’t love a man till you learn to love yourself.”
Rally threw up her hands. “What does that mean? Learning to love yourself?”
Kim shrugged.
Rally was a travel writer. She wrote for Five Kingdoms magazine, and she was routinely sent to locales that she classified as exotic or lame. Exotic places that she’d covered included Capri and Dublin. A lame place was Moab, Utah, where Rally met nobody wonderful and almost got bitten by a snake.
“I have to meet at least one wonderful person,” Rally told Kim. “Otherwise, a place isn’t exotic.”
“Isn’t it hit or miss, though?” said Kim. “I mean, what if you’re only in a town for a weekend and all the wonderful locals are away?”
Rally had stunning honey-colored hair that tumbled to her waist and got her free drinks. When she and Kim talked at night, they sat together on their couch, and Kim, who was a salon stylist, fooled with Rally’s hair. Kim never left Manhattan.
“If I were wonderful,” said Kim, “I wouldn’t go parading in front of some travel-writing chick. I’d stay in and order Chinese and learn to love myself.”
“Sooner or later,” said Rally, “you’d go out. I’d catch you.”
Rally was obsessed with what made people wonderful. It was usually what she least expected, but she knew the truth when she found it. In Dublin she’d hoped to meet blue-eyed men, raconteurs who would buy her pints and tell her stories. Instead, it was the Irishwomen who fascinated Rally, the young ones with babies, or the ones with pale skin and cigarettes.In Montana, Rally had talked to countless cowboys—men with blue jeans and money—hoping to sniff out the spirit of the West for a piece she was writing. But it was in Glacier National Park, listening to a park ranger named Russ, a little barrel of a fellow with a lisp, that Rally felt the stubborn inconsequence of men in the wild. What startled Rally, andkept her traveling, was this: when the wonder of an individualhuman being struck her—when an Irishwoman took smokein her mouth, or a park ranger’s voice broke—Rally felt a throb of loneliness and wanted to kiss that person. Sometimes she wanted only gentle contact, a brushing of her lips on the stranger’s cheek. Other times she wanted violent, total commiseration. Park ranger Russ must have been sixty, but he had such a noble manner and was so committed to the things he said about ice and bears, that, given the moment, Rally would have pressed her mouth to his, kissed him deeply, tried to entwine her solitude with his.
In actual fact, Rally hardly ever spoke to these strangers, much less kissed them. She told no one of her impulsive desires, because they struck her as amoral and frightening. She imagined conversations with a phantom psychiatrist, always a man.
I want to kiss the smoke in that Irishwoman’s mouth, she confessed.
Why? asked the man.
Because she is sad, said Rally. And she’s tired of Dublin. And she’ll never have that particular smoke in her mouth again.
Are you a bisexual? asked the man. A swinger?
No, Rally answered. But I can’t kiss the smoke without kissing the woman. Don’t you understand?
Of course, Rally’s phantom psychiatrist never did understand, and, deep inside, neither did Rally. So, rather than understand herself, she took the wonder she felt around certain strangers, her desire to kiss them, and wove it into the stories she wrote for Five Kingdoms. When she wrote about Capri, Rally thought of the old woman she’d helped up a stairway there. As she described the Blue Grotto or the cliffs or linguine with clams, Rally kept her mind on the old woman and fashioned each sentence as if it were a dignified kiss to the old woman’s forehead. Somehow, such kisses came through in her writing, because Sabrina, Rally’s boss and editor, loved Rally’s stories.
“You have a gift,” said Sabrina one night. “An absolute gift.”
“Aha.” Kim held up her hand like a crossing guard. “Rally McWilliams has a gift. But does she love herself?”
“Screw you,” laughed Rally.
Rally, Sabrina, Kim, and Dr. Charm were at Minotaur’s, a basement nightclub. Kim and Rally were there because it was Friday, and because Rally knew Half Stack, the Minotaur’s DJ. Sabrina was there because she was single and pretty. Kim wanted to dance, so she dragged Dr. Charm to the mosh pit. Rally and Sabrina stood at the bar, drinking champagne, talking about France. Rally was flying to France in November to do a piece on Beaujolais nouveau.
“Five Kingdoms will pay for ten days,” said Sabrina. “Just don’t spend the whole time drinking Beaujolais on our dime.”
“I don’t want to drink it,” said Rally. “I want to know why everyone freaks about it.”
A song Rally loved came on. A guy with pink hair asked Sabrina to dance. Sabrina consented, and the guy waltzed her off. Rally was left alone at the bar.
“You shouldn’t wear your hair like that,” said a man’s voice.
Rally turned.
The man was wearing a black jacket and spooning sugar into a glass of whiskey. He had short, sharp black sideburns, and a slight bulge in the left rib cage of his jacket near his heart. Rally thought the bulge might be a gun.
“Me?” said Rally.
The man surveyed Rally’s outfit. She wore blue-jean overalls with a white T-shirt. Her hair was in two pigtails that sprouted up, then back, then down.
“You should wear one long braid down the middle of your back.” The man kept sugaring his whiskey. “Simple, classic. None of this little-girl business.”
Rally raised her eyebrows. The man seemed in his early thirties. He had handsome cheekbones, and jungle-green eyes. Rally smiled.
“I thought guys li
ked the little-girl business,” she said.
The man stirred his drink. When he stopped stirring, the liquid still had crystals in it.
“I’m Patrick Rigg,” said the man.
Rally checked the dance floor. Sabrina and the pink-haired man were still a couple. Kim and her doctor had vanished.
“I’m Rally McWilliams. I’m a travel writer.” She tapped his glass. “What’s with the sugar?”
Patrick shrugged. “It’s what I like.”
Rally felt a vibe under her skin, an alert. She looked more closely at Patrick’s sideburns, decided they were a safe length.
“Whatever happened to straight whiskey?” she teased. “You know. Simple, classic.”
Patrick sucked the knuckle of his thumb, as if he’d recently banged and hurt it.
“This is what I like,” he said, holding up his glass.
At the end of the night Rally gave Patrick her phone number. Back at the loft she told Kim about him.
“He works on Wall Street,” said Rally, “and he may carry a gun. He had a strange bulge in his shirt.”
“Amen to strange bulges,” said Kim, and Rally blushed.
Patrick didn’t call for a week. When he did call, it was on a Friday in mid-September, just past four in the afternoon.
“Meet me at Saks at five o’clock,” he told Rally. “Take a cab so you aren’t late. Wear your overalls, a plain white T-shirt, and a strapless bra. French-braid your hair, and don’t wear a coat.”
“Who made you commandant?” said Rally.
Patrick hung up. Rally looked at the phone in shock.
Presumptuous bastard, she thought.
But it was a warm evening, with an orange, autumn tint in the clouds. So Rally dressed as Patrick asked, except she chose a T-shirt with a large, smiling Tweety Bird on the front.
When the cab pulled up to Saks, Patrick was waiting on the curb. He wore a black suit, and his eyes, in daylight, were even greener than Rally had hoped. As she stepped out of the cab, Patrick paid the driver.
“You’re on time.” Patrick pointed at Rally’s T-shirt. “But I told you, no decals.”
Rally put her hands to her hips. “Tweety was all I had,” she lied.
Patrick took Rally to the dress department. He had her try on ankle-length silk dresses, none of which cost less than a thousand dollars.
This is crazy, thought Rally. He doesn’t even know me.
But she liked the way the saleswoman handed her the dresses.
“That one,” said Patrick, when Rally came out in a svelte black Narciso Rodriguez with spaghetti straps.
Rally stared at herself in the mirror. She felt smooth in the dress: shivery and good.
“It’s thirty-five hundred dollars,” she said.
“It’s perfect.” Patrick turned to the saleswoman. “She’ll wear it out.”
The saleswoman nodded.
Rally’s eyes were wide. She came close to Patrick, touched his sleeve.
“You don’t even know me,” she whispered.
“Leave your overalls and such in the dressing room,” ordered Patrick. “They’ll be disposed of.”
Rally drew in a breath. For the first time she sensed that Patrick was ushering her into a new country, a realm where objects, probably even humans, could be purchased and discarded easily. She felt a thrill in her loins.
“I’ll need shoes,” she said firmly.
Patrick bought Rally a pair of heels as black, unadorned, and indulgent as her dress. He paid for her makeover at the Glorybrook cosmetic counter, which was run, as far as Rally could tell, by well-dressed, well-paid witches. These women put fine shadows over Rally’s eyes, drew bloodred lipstick across her mouth, misted her with a perfume called Serendipity. Rally endured all of this quietly, like a child being bathed. She kept her eyes on Patrick, who stood at the end of the Glorybrook counter, staring at her. His eyes, Rally saw, had a proprietary cast to them, a pitched look of want.
He’s going to devour me, thought Rally.
The witches kept scratching and rubbing Rally. When they finished, Patrick tipped them each one hundred dollars, which only made Rally hornier.
He’s going to devour me, she thought, and I’m going to let him.
They dined that night in the upstairs room at Duranigan’s, which Rally had heard was the exclusive haunt of mobsters and beautiful people. Patrick and Rally ate quail, and arugula basil salad, and Patrick ordered Rally champagne made by monks. Patrick himself drank what he always drank, an old-fashioned with Old Grand-dad whiskey and sugar. Rally noticed again the discreet bulge close to Patrick’s heart. It made her ask questions.
“Tell me about your work,” she said.
“No,” said Patrick.
“Your family, then.”
Patrick’s teeth were busy with quail, but he looked at Rally as if she were insane.
Rally frowned. “How about college? I mean, you went to college, didn’t you?”
“Stop it,” said Patrick.
Rally swallowed hard. She crossed and uncrossed her legs beneath the table.
“Stop asking about stupid things,” said Patrick.
Rally glanced around. There were several burly Italian men eating pasta at a corner table, but they didn’t have bulges in their coats.
“Well.” Rally looked back at Patrick, blinked her blackened lashes. “We have to talk about something, don’t we?”
Patrick’s lips curled. His suit fit him perfectly, he had broad shoulders, and he seemed to Rally absolutely content to reveal nothing about himself.
“Tell me something crucial, then,” she told him. “Say something crucial.”
Patrick sipped his whiskey. His eyes scanned the ceiling.
“Once,” he said, “when I was five, I jabbed a shish kebab skewer through my brother Francis’s hand.”
“On purpose?” gasped Rally.
“We were playing acupuncture. Francis told me to do it. He was older. He said it would heal him.”
Rally thought about that. “Straight through the hand?”
“Straight through. You could see the skewer on both sides. Like in a film where a cowboy gets an arrow through the leg.”
“Jesus,” whispered Rally. She was done eating now. A waiter took her plate.
“Was there much blood?” asked Rally.
“There really wasn’t,” said Patrick.
Who is this guy? Rally thought.
After dinner they went to Patrick’s apartment. He lived on the Upper West Side, in a tall, looming brownstone called the Preemption apartment building. The Preemption had a splendid, ancient elevator, with mahogany doors, but Patrick didn’t kiss Rally inside this elevator as she thought he might. He got her to his home, gave her a glass of water.
“Do you have a housemate?” asked Rally.
“Yes,” said Patrick. “He works with me. His name is James Branch. Come see my bedroom.”
Patrick’s bedroom featured a queen-size bed and a full-length oval dressing mirror with an ornate wooden border. The wood of the border was fashioned into overlapping vines with thorns on them. Patrick took Rally by the shoulders, turned her body to the mirror.
“Stand still,” said Patrick. “Cross your arms behind you.”
Rally stood still. She waited for kisses.
“Watch yourself in the mirror. Keep your wrists crossed at the small of your back.”
Rally was nervous, but she did it. The room was dark, but there was enough moonlight for her to see the slink of her figure, the red dash of her lips. Patrick stood behind her, half a foot taller than Rally, and his hands came around her shoulders to the front of her neck. One of his hands held, to Rally’s surprise, a small, open jackknife.
She froze. “Hey.”
“Stay still,” said Patrick.
Very carefully, Patrick took the bodice of Rally’s dress, just below the front of her neck, and cut a niche in the silk.
Rally’s heart lurched.
“Patrick,” she comp
lained, “this dress cost you thousands.”
“Be quiet and watch.” Patrick closed the knife, dropped it in his pocket. He gripped Rally’s dress at the neck, on either side of the niche. Rally felt the pressure of his elbows on her shoulders. Then his hands rent the length of her dress in two. The silk parted like curtains.
“Patrick,” whispered Rally. She leaned back against him, but Patrick leveled her steady on her feet.
“Watch,” he said.
Rally frowned, but watched, while Patrick wrapped the dregs of the dress around her neck, sashing it into a scarf that hung down over her breasts. All Rally wore now were her white bra and underwear and black heels and a pricey scarf.
“Patrick.” Rally gripped his thigh. “Patrick, kiss me.”
Patrick removed Rally’s hand from his thigh. He held her wrists crossed firmly behind her. He was strong, and fully clothed.
“Now look at yourself,” he told her.
Rally’s skin went over to goose bumps. She wanted to be underneath Patrick, on his bed.
“Patrick, can’t we just—”
“Be quiet and look.” His voice was resolute.
Reluctantly, Rally stared into the mirror. She saw her pale, full-figured self in white-and-black trappings. She saw her bowleggedness, the way her knees never touched, no matter how closely together she rammed her heels. Her high-school track coach had told Rally her bowed legs gave her balance as a sprinter, but she wasn’t a sprinter tonight. Patrick still gripped her wrists, and Rally was filled suddenly with hatred for him, anger at the fact that he wouldn’t kiss her, that he wouldn’t let her hands free to rip the black silk from her neck.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
Patrick tisked his tongue. “Look at yourself. I want you to see what I see.”
Rally tried to turn around. “Are you going to hurt me?”
Patrick put one hand to Rally’s chin, made her face the mirror. “This is how I see you,” he said. “Look.”
Rally thought she could get one hand free if she yanked, but she didn’t try it. She didn’t yank free, didn’t reach for the scarf, didn’t rip it off. She wanted to know if there was going to be kissing and lovemaking. She also wanted to know what she was going to wear home now that her overalls were the property of Saks Fifth Avenue and her new dress was in shreds around her neck. On the other hand, as Rally stared at the mirror—at her half-naked self and the shadow that held her—there was a quickness in her breathing.
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